Friday, September 19, 2008

Everybody's talking about it...

...but few folks have anything this worthy to contribute.Bosko Blagojevic's "Hard to See, Harder to Imagine" post at ArtCal Zine is only a modest taking-stock, but it reads like a prose poem. It isn't just our ailing economy that needs examination; indeed, the capitalistic economic machine always operates in a fugue.

"Financial journalism, and economics since around the mid 17th century, has increasingly been about abstractions: intricate movements of people, money and material described and occasionally visualized, but remaining essentially invisible. They endure, like climate change and remote international conflicts, as that which might inspire excitement, worry, fear, or action - and yet necessarily demand a kind of belief in order to do so. Belief in the economy, as belief in anything else, becomes a certain emotional temperature that elevates a thing from an idea to a fact. It cannot be anything but this. So it may be with a sense of puzzled anxiety, an anxiety without an image or a face, that one reads in today's Times of the $85 billion Federal loan to save A.I.G., the capsizing international insurance giant. Equal puzzlement or slightly chastened awe, perhaps, might be inspired on the same day upon reading, on top of Artforum.com's news page, of Damien Hirst's potentially precedent-setting 2-day primary market auction sale, collecting for the artist $200.8 million in the sale of all but three of the 167 works to see the auction block. These numbers in their excess, of profits or deficits, seem to become less real with each shift in the order of magnitude, or move of the decimal point."

Note: This post follows an auction announcement, albeit a benefit auction. As Alanis would say, isn't it ironic?